January 11
Theodosios was the first founder and organizer of the cenobitic way of monastic life. He was born in the province of Cappadocia in the village of Mogarisses, of devout parents. As a child, he visited St. Simeon the Stylite, who blessed him and prophesied great spiritual glory for him. Carrying a censer in which he placed unlit charcoal and incense, Theodosios sought out a place where he could settle and establish his monastery, and he stopped when the charcoal began to burn on its own. There he settled and began to live the ascetic life. He soon gathered around him many monks of various nationalities. He built a church for each nationality, so that services and hymns were offered to God in Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and other tongues at the same time. But on the day of Holy Communion all the brotherhood gathered in the great church, in which the Greek language was used. There was a common table for all, common property, common penance, common labour, common endurance and, not rarely, common hunger. Theodosios was an exalted model of life to all the monks — an example in labour, prayer, fasting, watchfulness and all Christian virtues. God granted him the gift of working miracles, by which he was able to heal the sick, appear to people in distant places and help them, tame wild beasts, discern the future, and cause bread and wheat to multiply. Prayer was on his lips day and night. He reposed peacefully in the Lord in the year 529, the 105th year after his birth.
Source: St. Nikolai Velimirovic, The Prologue of Ohrid – Volume One.
Apolytikion
With the rivers of your tears, you have made the barren desert fertile. Through sighs of sorrow from deep within you, your labors have borne fruit a hundred-fold. By your miracles you have become a light, shining upon the world. O Theodosios, our Holy Father, pray to Christ our God, to save our souls.
Kontakion
As being planted in the courts of Christ thy Lord and God, with holy virtues thou delightfully didst blossom forth and didst multiply thy children amid the desert, who were watered with the showers of thy fervent tears, O chief shepherd of the godly sheepfold of our God. Hence we cry to thee: Rejoice, O Father Theodosios.